Winter heating
Aircon heating for Cape Town winters
A reverse-cycle split cools in summer and heats in winter from the same wall unit. If you're putting in an aircon anyway, it's worth choosing and placing it with the cold months in mind, not only January.
This page gives you the winter numbers for Cape Town, the City's current electricity tariff and a straight way to work out what heating a room will cost you.
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How cold and wet winter gets
These are the official 1991 to 2020 climate normals for the weather station at Cape Town International Airport.
June: average daily low
8.1 °C
July: average daily low
7.4 °C
August: average daily low
7.9 °C
July: average daily high
17.9 °C
The rain lines up with the cold. June averages 92.3 mm of rain at the airport, against 9.4 mm in January, and June averages 10.1 days with at least 1 mm of rain.
One caution: the airport station is on the Cape Flats, and we have no station figures for the coastal suburbs, so don't read these numbers as Sea Point's or Camps Bay's. Areas like Brackenfell and Durbanville have their own pages, without borrowed weather claims.
What a kilowatt-hour costs in 2026/27
The City of Cape Town's 2026/27 residential tariffs took effect on 1 July 2026 for customers in the City's supply area. Here is the Home User tariff:
| Home User tariff, 2026/27 | Excluding VAT | Including VAT |
|---|---|---|
| Energy, first 600 kWh a month | 309.52 c/kWh | 355.95 c/kWh |
| Energy, above 600 kWh a month | 407.88 c/kWh | 469.06 c/kWh |
| Services and Wires Charge | R368.96 a month | R424.30 a month |
Source: City of Cape Town, "The cost of electricity", read 9 November 2026. The City has other residential tariffs too, such as Domestic, and for Eskom-supplied areas the City refers customers to Eskom.
The step at 600 kWh matters in winter. Once your household passes 600 kWh in a month, every extra kWh, the heating's included, is billed at the higher rate.
Working out your own running cost
We won't give you a rand-per-hour figure for "an aircon", because it depends on the model. What you need is the unit's rated power input in heating mode, in kilowatts, from the manufacturer's specification for that exact model. Then:
- Multiply the heating power input (kW) by the hours you expect to run it. That's your kWh.
- Multiply the kWh by your tariff from the table above.
- If the month already takes you past 600 kWh, use the higher line.
Whether the unit is an inverter matters too, at least by one maker's account. Midea South Africa says non-inverter units are cheaper to buy but consume up to 40% more electricity. That's Midea's claim, and we haven't found an independent South African figure to check it against.
Size matters as much for heat as for cool. LG South Africa's chart is headed "cooling/heating capacity" and runs from 9k BTU for 15 to 20 m² up to 36k BTU for 60 to 80 m². Our article on choosing a size and estimating running costs compares it with other brands, and the full installation picture, certificates included, is on our split installation page for homes.
Prices for the install itself, from several published sources, are on our aircon installation cost page.
Heating and running-cost questions
Plan for winter, not only summer
Tell us which room you want to heat, its size and which way it faces. It costs nothing to ask for a quote.
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